Results for “duflo” 69 found
Who will win the economics Nobel Prize this year?
Diane Coyle mentions some possible picks:
Environmental economics: Partha Dasgupta, William Nordhaus
Update: Twitter folks strongly recommend adding Martin Weitzman in this category.
Growth: Paul Romer, Robert Barro
Inequality: Anthony Atkinson, Angus Deaton
Innovation (and much else): Will Baumol (now 93!)
Econometrics: David Hendry
All good guesses. I’ll add Diamond and Dybvig for banking, and possibly an early grant to Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer for development and RCTs. That would make economics look scientific, for a year at least. I expect Bernanke, Woodford, and Svensson to get a prize as well for monetary economics, although probably not right now. It is too close to Bernanke’s memoir and Svensson’s tenure at the Swedish central bank.
Here is a WSJ list. What do you think? Since I’ve never once been right about a particular year, trying to pick someone would only curse them. The award will come this Monday of course.
Neil Irwin on the rise of Stanford economics
But the recent recruiting success of Stanford shows something broader about how the economics profession is changing. The specialties of the new recruits vary, but they are all examples of how the momentum in economics has shifted away from theoretical modeling and toward “empirical microeconomics,” the analysis of how things work in the real world, often arranging complex experiments or exploiting large sets of data. That kind of work requires lots of research assistants, work across disciplines including fields like sociology and computer science, and the use of advanced computational techniques unavailable a generation ago.
That trend is evident across leading economics departments — the traditional powerhouses have plenty of scholars doing work in the same vein, including work by Esther Duflo at M.I.T. on how to test ways to fight global poverty and by Roland G. Fryer Jr. at Harvard on the roots of racial inequality. But the scholars who have newly signed on with Stanford described a university particularly well suited to research in that vein, with a combination of lab space, strong budgets for research support and proximity to engineering talent.
The article is interesting throughout.
The new RCT results on poverty reduction
Declan Butler reports:
Giving some of the world’s poorest people a two-year aid package — including cash, food, health-care services, skills training and advice — improves their livelihoods for at least a year after the support is cut off, according to the results of an experiment involving more than 10,000 households in six countries.
The poverty intervention had already been trialled successfully in Bangladesh, and the study’s researchers say it shows the approach works in other cultures too. “We finally have truly credible evidence that a programme for the poorest of the poor can really help them meaningfully reduce their poverty,” says Dean Karlan, an economist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and a co-author of the study, reported today in Science. “Until now, we haven’t really been able to go to a government outside Bangladesh and say, we’re confident this works.”
Ethiopia, one of the countries that was in the trial, is planning to continue and scale up the intervention to cover around 3 million people, says Karlan, and Pakistan and India are considering scaling up interventions, too.
Banerjee and Duflo are involved in the work as well, and this is sometimes called the “graduation model,” because the aim is to graduate people out of poverty. Note this:
The intervention is not cheap. Costs per household ranged from $1,455 in India to $5,962 in Pakistan, although they were offset by positive returns on investment ranging from 133% in Ghana to 433% in India. The researchers hope to cut costs in future by scaling back the experiment’s more expensive components, such as training.
And while the model worked in many places, it failed in rural southern India and Honduras, in part due to…problems with chickens. Nonetheless this is big, big news. The link to the original research is here.
For pointers I thank Kevin Lewis and Michelle Dawson.
The French disease is not just hypochondria
From a Jean Tirole press conference:
French economist Jean Tirole advocated Scandinavian-style labour market policies and government reform as a way of preserving France’s social model.
Hours after he won the economics Nobel Prize, Tirole said he felt “sad” the French economy was experiencing difficulties despite having “a lot of assets”.
“We haven’t succeeded in France to undertake the labour market reforms that are similar to those in Germany, Scandinavia and so on,” he said in telephone interview from the French city of Toulouse, where he teaches.
France is plagued by record unemployment and Tirole described the French job market as “catastrophic” earlier on Monday, arguing that the excessive protection for employees had frozen the country’s job market.
“We haven’t succeeded also in downsizing the state, which is an issue because we have a social model that I approve of – I’m very much in favour of this social model – but it won’t be sustainable if the state is too big,” he added.
Tirole remarked that northern European countries, as well as Canada and Australia, had proven you could keep a welfare social model with smaller government. In contrast, he said France’s “big state” threatened its social policies because there will not be “enough money to pay for it in the long run”.
There is more here, hat tip goes to Alex. And I very much liked this Appelbaum interview with Tirole,here is one bit:
There’s no easy line in summarizing my contribution and the contribution of my colleagues. It is industry-specific. The way you regulate payment cards has nothing to do with the way that you regulate intellectual property or railroads. There are lots of idiosyncratic factors. That’s what makes it all so interesting. It’s very rich.
It requires some understanding of how an industry works. And then the reasoning is very much based on game theory. Usually we don’t have a perfectly competitive market, so we use game theory, which describes situations with a small number of actors. And information economics, those are the tools. But then you go into the industries and try to think about the possible rules. It’s not a one-line thing.
I liked David Henderson’s piece, and this one too, Tirole on France and Canada.
On-line education at the AEA meetings in Philadelphia
I can recommend to you all the session Economics Education in the Digital Age, scheduled for Saturday, January 4, at 10:15 a.m.
Nancy Rose is chairing the proceedings and presented papers will be by Caroline Hoxby, Banerjee and Duflo, and Acemoglu, Laibson, and List, as well as by Alex and myself. They are all very interesting papers, as you would expect from these economists.
Thomson Reuters predicts the 2013 Nobel Laureate in economics
Joshua D. Angrist, David E. Card, Alan B. Krueger, Sir David F. Hendry, M. Hashem Pesaran, Peter C.B. Phillips, Sam Peltzman, and Richard A. Posner, all very good possible picks in my view.
My personal prediction (which never once has been correct, at least not in the proper year) is for an early “shock” prize to Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer, in part to show (try to show?) that economics really is an actual science.
In any case the above link offers Reuters picks for the science prizes as well. Here are some other speculations for the science prizes as well.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Assorted links
1. Obscene titles for refereed journal articles.
2. Video about concrete tents.
3. Video about how the Japanese are demolishing one building.
4. Ryan Avent on labor force participation and structural unemployment.
5. New blog on monetary economics.
6. Do the Democrats face a demographic problem of their own?
7. A tale of status competition (and read the comments too).
Assorted links
1. The KFC culture that is Japan, and Pizza Hut innovation from China.
2. Critical review of Banerjee and Duflo.
3. What really happened in the Anglo-Irish deal?
4. Competitive wood planing, and does the CBO believe in the great stagnation?
5. Do people swap genes more easily than folk tales?
The Foreign Policy Top Global Thinkers
You will find it here, Scott Sumner makes the list, as do Piketty and Saez and many others, including Buiter, Krugman, Roubini, Feldstein, Duflo, Acemoglu, Zingales, and Paul Romer. Ruchir Sharma too.
Handicapping the 2012 Nobel
This article mentions Alvin Roth, Bob Shiller, Richard Thaler, Robert Barro, Lars Hansen, Anthony Atkinson, Angus Deaton, Jean Tirole, Stephen Ross, and William Nordhaus.
I’ll predict a triple prize to Shiller, Thaler, and Eugene Fama. Fama clearly deserves it, can’t win it solo (too strongly EMH in an age of financial crisis), but can be bundled with two people from behavioral finance and irrational exuberance theories.
Barro will get it, but not in an election year. Hansen and Ross are good picks but I don’t see them getting it before Fama does. Paul Romer deserves mention but this is probably not his year because of politics in Honduras.
William Baumol cannot be ruled out. A neat idea — but unlikely — is Martin Feldstein and Joseph Newhouse for their pioneering work in health care economics, plus for Feldstein there is public finance too.
Tirole and Nordhaus are deserving perennials, with various bundlings (e.g., Oliver Hart, or for Nordhaus other names in environmental). I hope the Krueger-Tullock idea is not dead but I would bet against it, same with Armen Alchian and Albert Hirschman. Dale Jorgensen has a shot.
I believe Duflo and Banerjee (and possibly Michael Kremer too, maybe even Robert Townsend) will get it sooner than people are expecting, though not this year as they just presented in Stockholm. Next year I think.
Not once in the past have I been right about this.
Addendum: Here is the talk from Northwestern.
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
You will find it here. The contents include:
James Tooley on Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics: Banerjee and Duflo propose to bypass the “big questions” of economic development and focus instead on “small steps” to improvement. But, says Tooley, they proceed to make big judgments about education in developing countries, judgments not supported by their own evidence.
Why the Denial? Pauline Dixon asks why writers at UNESCO, Oxfam, and elsewhere have denied or discounted the success and potentiality of private schooling in developing countries.
Neither necessary nor sufficient, but… Thomas Mayer critically appraises Stephen Ziliak and Deirdre McCloskey’s influential writings, particularly The Cult of Statistical Significance. McCloskey and Ziliak reply.
Was Occupational Licensing Good for Minorities? Daniel Klein, Benjamin Powell, and Evgeny Vorotnikov take issue with a JLE article by Marc Law and Mindy Marks. Law and Marks reply.
Mankiw vs. DeLong and Krugman on the CEA’s Real GDP Forecasts in Early 2009: David Cushman shows how a careful econometrician might have adjudicated the debate among these leading economists over the likelihood of a macroeconomic rebound.
Assorted links
Development economics of education bleg
What should I read? There is no need to re-recommend Banerjee and Duflo, Lant Pritchett, or James Tooley on this topic, namely education in developing countries. What else? I thank you in advance for your counsel.
Three new additions to my pile
Jonathan Schlefer, The Assumptions Economists Make.
James K. Galbraith, Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis.
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. Not their only co-authorship, now out in paperback.
Assorted links
1. The Cal State system, America’s largest, will take significant steps into on-line education.
2. Robot prejudice.
3. A new Banerjee and Duflo paper (pdf), RCTs and governance.
4. More on the Apple job creation claims.
5. More on Iceland and Canada; they seem to want to go back to a fixed exchange rate, life as a floater isn’t always so simple.